I see some people arguing against the extended magazines such that should they have been outlawed, Loughner couldn't have created such a high victim count. If I recall, the VTech shooter carried multiple handguns and Loughner could have done the same thing. I would even argue that a novice or semi skilled swordsman with a sharp blade could have done a massive amount of damage in that setting as well. A homemade bomb could have done as much or even more. I can think of several ways that someone could easily attack many people in a short amount of time in a confined space where a large capacity magazine wouldn't even be needed.
To take it a step further, the key to this is accepting that the firearm
is an easy, convenient way of accomplishing this goal. The problem with any focus on the firearm itself, though, is that, even if by some impossible work of Big Brother statism we instituted enough control to wipe firearms off the North American continent (and prevent further important or manufacture thereof), guns would simply cease to be the most
convenient way to do it.
Guns were never the only way, though, so people motivated enough to throw their lives away over such a monstrous crime would surely seek out other, slightly less convenient alternatives, to be left to their own horrendous imaginations. It occurs to me that there have been a veritable litany of scarily successful knife-wielding massacres in China in recent years. It also occurs to me that, had the Columbine twerps not had guns conveniently around, they very well might have been less inclined to half-ass their bombs, or they might have tried again with new bombs after fixing their initial flaws. It has been reported that, had their bombs worked as intended, the death toll would have been in the hundreds.
A world of machete massacres and bombings is not an improvement over our present state of affairs. If we wish to address a problem of violence, we need to look elsewhere than the superficial, simplistic analyses.
